"Corporate Voice": Poetic Personation and Political Theology in Early Modern England

My project aims to revitalize the study of personification (personation), a trope of verbal attribution that defined striking developments in early modern poetics and political thought. Personation, which encompasses speaking as another on stage as well as for another as a proxy, raises complex political-theological questions about presence, identity, legitimacy, and agency. Concentrating on fictions of personhood, ritual and rhetorical speech acts, and the surrogacy of nonhuman material objects, I argue that early modern authors like Sidney (in the New Arcadia), Spenser (in Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale and The Shepheardes Calender), and Shakespeare (in the Henriad) turned to personation in responding to contemporary political-theological crises, shaping a discussion of representation and delegation within their fictions that influenced later political philosophers such as Hobbes.